Mobile computing devices such as personal desktop assistants, contemporary mobile telephones, hand-held and pocket-sized computers, tablet personal computers and the like, are becoming important and popular user tools. In general, they have become small enough to be extremely convenient, while consuming less battery power, and at the same time have become capable of running more powerful applications.
Such devices are able to connect to networks, including the Internet. Contemporary mobile devices such as a PocketPC thus may present web pages to users. Likewise, mobile telephones such as those running Microsoft® Smartphone software allow users to make conventional mobile telephone calls and also access the Internet, as well as send and receive e-mails and files, store contacts, maintain appointments and do many other things contemporary computers can now do.
While the network connectivity features of such devices provide a number of benefits, their small screen size leads to a number of problems. For example, one of the fundamental difficulties with web browsing on mobile devices today is presenting web content on the small screen of a mobile device in a way that users can easily use and understand. At the source end, content providers may not know the type of devices that are accessing their site, but even if they did, many would not provide different page layouts based on each type of device. At the receiving end, shrinking the size of an existing website page to fit a small screen makes the page content too small to be easily viewed. As a result, devices with small screens are arranged to show only a portion of the page at a time, and provide horizontal and vertical scrolling mechanisms for the user to move around, which is essentially like shifting the content around behind a small, fixed viewing aperture.
However, requiring the user to scroll in two dimensions to read content is not a very desirable solution. This is because users easily get lost and are otherwise confused as to where they are positioned within a page. Also, lines of text that are wider than the screen become difficult to read, as the user has to scroll to the right to finish reading one line of text, and all the way back left to begin reading the next line. In sum, small devices do not match up well with conventionally-provided web content.